seeming combination of the schizoid and the reasonable, might recommend it to the

attention of political societies where political power frequently-and mercifully-changes

hands.

Given the anti-Utopian polemic of Karl Popper, given the – fundamentally –

anti-hedgehog innuendo of Isaiah Berlin, the bias of this argument should now be clear:

it is better to think of an aggregation of small, and even contradictory set pieces (almost

like the products of different regimes) than to entertain fantasies about total and "fault-

less" solutions which the condition of politics can only abort. Its implication is an

installation of the Villa Adriana as some sort of model presenting the demands of the

ideal and the needs of the ad hoc, and its further implication is that some such installation

begins, politically, to be necessary.

But, of course, the Villa Adriana is not simply a physical collision of set

pieces. It is not merely a reproduction of Rome. For it also presents an iconography as

complex as its plan. Here the reference is supposed to be to Egypt, there we are

supposed to be in Syria, and, elsewhere, we might be in Athens: and thus, while

physically the villa presents itself as a version of the Imperial metropolis, it further

operates as an ecumenical illustration of the mix provided by the Empire and, almost, as

a series of mementos of Hadrian's travels. Which is to say that, in Villa Adriana, apart

from physical collisions (though dependent on them), we are, above all else, in the

presence of a highly impacted condition of symbolic reference: and which is further to

introduce an argument that must be deferred: the argument that, in Villa Adriana, we

are in the presence of something like what, today, it is customary to speak of as collage.

Collision City and the Politics of Bricolage

The cult of crisis in the inter-war period: before it is too late society must rid itself of

outmoded sentiment, thought, technique: and if, in order to prepare for its impending

deliverance, it must be ready to make tabula rasa, the architect as key figure in this

transformation, must be ready to assume the historical lead. For the built world of

human habitation and venture is the very cradle of the new order and, if he is properly

to rock it, the architect must be ready to come forward as a front-line combatant in the

battle for humanity. Perhaps, while claiming to be scientific, the architect had never

previously operated within quite so fantastic a psycho-political milieu: but, if this is to

parenthesise, it was for such reasons – Pascalian reasons of the heart – that the city

became hypothesised as no more than the result of "scientific" findings and a completely

glad "human" collaboration. Such became the activist Utopian total design. Perhaps an

impossible vision: and for those who, during the past fifty or sixty years (many of them

must be dead) have been awaiting the establishment of this city, it must have become

increasingly clear that the promise – such as it is – cannot be kept. Or so one might

have thought: but, although the total design message has had a somewhat spotted

career and has often elicited scepticism, it has remained, and possibly to this day, as the

psychological substratum of urban theory and its practical application. Indeed it has

been so little repressible that, in the last few years, a newly inspired and wholly literal

version of this message has been enabled to appear as renditions of the "systems"

approach and other "methodological" finds.

We have largely introduced Karl Popper to support an anti-Utopian

argument with which we do not wholly agree; but in our interpretation of the activist

Utopia our indebtedness to Popper's position should surely be evident. It is a position

which, particularly when stated at length as in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)

and The Poverty of Historicism (1957)11, it is hard to evade; and one might have

thought that the idea of modern architecture as science, as potentially part of a unified

comprehensive science, ideally like physics (the best of all possible sciences) could

scarcely have protracted itself to survive into a world which also included the Popperian

critique of just such fantasies. But this is to misunderstand the hermetic and retarded

nature of architectural debate: and, in those areas where Popperian criticism appears to

be unknown and where the "science" of early modern architecture is also presumed to

be painfully deficient, it goes without saying that the problem-solving methods proposed

are laborious and often extended.

One has only to contemplate the scrupulousness of the operation in a text

such as Notes on the Synthesis of Form12 to get the picture. Obviously a "clean" process

dealing with "clean" information, atomised, cleaned, and then cleaned again, everything

is ostensibly wholesome and hygienic; but, resulting from the inhibiting characteristics of

commitment, especially physical commitment, the product seems never to be quite so

prominent as the process. And something comparable might be said about the related

production of stems, webs, grids, and honeycombs which, in the later' 60s, became so

conspicuous an industry. Both are attempts to avoid any imputation of prejudice: and if,

in the first case, empirical facts are presumed to be value-free and finally ascertainable,

in the second, the co-ordinates of a grid are awarded an equal impartialiry. For, like the

lines of longitude and latitude, it seems to be hoped that these will, in some way,

eliminate any bias, or even responsibility, in a specification of the infilling detail.

Diagram from Christopher Alexander's Notes on

the Synthesis of Form.

But, if the ideally neutral observer is surely a critical fiction, if among the

multipliciry of phenomena with which we are surrounded we observe what we wish to

observe, if our judgements are inherently selective because the quantiry of factual

information is finally indigestible, and if any literal usage of a "neutral" grid labours

under approximate problems, the myth of the architect as eighteenth-century natural

philosopher, with all his little measuring rods, balances, and retorts, as both messiah

and scientist, Moses and [Isaac] Newton (a myth which became all the more ludicrous after

irs annexation by the architect's less well-pedigreed cousin, the planner), must now be

brought into proximity with The Savage Mind and with everything which bricolage represents.

"There still exists among ourselves," says Claude Levi-Strauss,

an activity which on the technical plane gives us quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer ro call "prior" rather than "primitive" could have been on the plane of speculation. This is what is commonly called "bricolage" in French;13

and he then proceeds to an extended analysis of the different objectives of bricolage and

science, of the respective roles of the "bricoleur" and the engineer.

In its old sense the verb "bricoler" applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting, and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying, or a horse swerving from irs direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our time the "bricoleur" is stilI someone who works with his hands and used devious means compared ro those of the craftsman.14

Now there is no intention to place the entire weight of the argument which follows upon Levi-

Strauss's observations. Rather the intention is to promote an identification which may, up to

a point, prove useful: and, so much so, that, if one may be inclined to recognise Le Corbusier

as a fox in hedgehog disguise, one may also be willing to envisage a parallel attempt at

camouflage: the "bricoleur" disguised as engineer.

Engineers fabricate the tools of their time .... Our engineers are healthy and virile, active, and useful, balanced and happy in their work. .. our engineers produce architecture for they employ a mathematical calculation which derives from narural law.15

Such is an almost entirely representative statement of early modern architecture's most

conspicuous prejudice. But then compare Levi-Strauss:

The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks: bur, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with "whatever is at hand," that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the bricoleurs means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project

(which would pre-suppose besides, that, as in the case of the engineer, there were, at least in theory, as many sets of tools and materials, or "instrumental sets," as there are different kinds of projects). It is to be defined only by its potential use ... because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that "they may always come in handy." Such elements are specialised up to a point, sufficiently for the bricoleur not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions, but not enough for each of them to have only one definite and determinate use. They represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are "operators," but they can be used for any operations of the same type.16

For our purposes it is unfortunate that Levi-Strauss does not lend himself to reasonable

laconic quotation. For the bricoleur, who certainly finds a representative in the "odd job

man," is also very much more than this. "It is common knowledge that the artist is both

something of a scientist and of a 'bricoleur";17 but, if artistic creation lies mid-way between

science and bricolage, this is not to imply that the bricoleur is "backward." "It might be said

that the engineer questions the universe while the 'bricoleur' addresses himself to a

collection of oddments left over from human endeavours";18 but it must also be insisted that

there is no question of primacy here. Simply the scientist and the bricoleur are to be

distinguished

by the inverse functions which they assign to events and structures as means and ends, the scientist creating events ... by means of structures and the "bricoleur" creating structures by means of events.19

But we are here, now, very far from the notion of an exponential, increasingly precise

"science" (a speedboat which architecture and urbanism are to follow like highly inexpert

water skiers); and, instead, we have not only a confrontation of the bricoleurs "savage mind"

with the "domesticated" mind of the engineer, but also a useful indication that these two

modes of thought are not representatives of a progressive serial (the engineer illustrating a

perfection of the bricoleur, etc.) but are, in fact, necessarily co-existent and complementary

conditions of the mind. In other words, we might be about to arrive at some approximation

of Levi-Strauss's "pensee logique au niveau du sensible."

For, if we can divest ourselves of the deceptions of professional amour propre

and accepted academic theory, the description of the bricoleur is far more a "real-life" speci-

fication of what the architect-urbanist is and does than any fantasy deriving from

"methodology" and "systemics." Indeed the predicament of architecture which, because it is

always in some way or another, concerned with amelioration, with by some standard,

however dimly perceived, making things better, with how things ought to be, is always

hopelessly involved with value judgements and can never be scientifically resolved-least of

all in terms of any simple empirical theory of "facts." And, if this is the case with reference to

architecture, then, in relation to urbanism (which is not even concerned in making things

stand up) the question of any scientific resolution of its problems can only become more

acute. For, if the notion of a "final" solution through a definitive accumulation of all data is,

evidently, an epistemological chimera, if certain aspects of information will invariably remain

undiscriminated or undisclosed, and if the inventory of "facts" can never be complete

because of the rates of change and obsolescence, then, here and now, it surely might be

possible to assert that the prospects of scientific city planning should, in reality, be regarded

as equivalent to the prospects of scientific politics.

For, if planning can barely be more scientific than the political society of which

it forms an agency, in the case of neither politics nor planning can there be sufficient infor-

mation acquired before action becomes necessary. In neither case can performance await an

ideal future formulation of the problem as it may, at last, be resolved; and, if this is because

the very possibility of that future where such formulation might be made depends on

imperfect action now, then this is only once more to intimate the role of bricolage which

politics so much resembles and city planning surely should.

But are the alternatives of "progressivist" total design (propelled by

hedgehogs?) and "culturalist" bricolage (propelled by foxes?) genuinely, at the last analysis,

all that we have available? We believe that they are; and we suppose that the political

implications of total design are nothing short of devastating. No ongoing condition of

compromise and expediency, of wilfulness and arbitrariness, but a supremely irresistible

combination of "science" and "destiny," such is the unacknowledged myth of the activist or

historicist Utopia: and, in this complete sense, total design was, and is, make believe. For,

on a mundane level, total design can only mean total control, and control not by abstractions

relating to the absolute value of science or history but by governments of man; and, if the

point scarcely requires emphasis, it can, still, not be too strongly asserted that total design

(however much it may be loved) assumes for its implementation a level of centralised

political and economic control which, given the presumption of political power as it now

exists anywhere in the world, can only be considered thoroughly unacceptable.

"The most tyrannical government of all, the government of nobody, the

totalitarianism of technique." Hannah Ahrendt's image of a horror may also now come to

mind: and, in this context, what then of "culturalist" bricolagr? One may anticipate its

dangers; but, as a deliberate recognition of the deviousness of histoty and change, of the

certainty of future sharp temporal caesuras, of the full tonality of societal gesture, a

conception of the city as intrinsically, and even ideally, a work of bricolage begins to deserve

serious attention. For, if total design may represent the surrender oflogical empiricism to a

most unempirical myth and if it may seem to envisage the future (when all will be known) as

a sort of dialectic of nondebate, it is because the bricoleur (like the fox) can entertain no such

prospects of conclusive synthesis, because, rather than with one world-infinitely extended

though subjected to the same generalisations-his vety activity implies a willingness and an

ability to deal with a plurality of closed finite sysrems (the collection of oddments left over from

human endeavour) that, for the time being at least, his behaviour may offer an important

model.

Indeed if we are willing to recognise the methods of science and bricolage as

concomitant propensities, if we are willing to recognise that they are, both of them, modes

of address to problems, if we are willing (and it may be hard) to concede equality between

the "civilised" mind (with its presumptions oflogical seriality) and the "savage" mind (with its

analogical leaps), then, in re-establishing bricolage alongside science, it might even be

possible to suppose that the way for a truly useful future dialectic could be prepared.

A truly useful dialectic? The idea is simply the conflict of contending powers,

the almost fundamental conflict of interest sharply stipulated, the legitimate suspicion about

others' interests, from which the democratic process-such as it is-proceeds: and then the

corollary to this idea is no mare than banal: if such is the case, that is if democracy is

compounded of libertarian enthusiasm and legalistic doubt, if it is inherently a collision of

points of view and acceptable as such, then why not allow a theory of contending powers (all

of them visible) as likely to establish a more ideally comprehensive city of the mind than any

which has, as yet, been invented?

With the Villa Adriana already in mind, the proposition leads us (like Pavlov's

dogs) automatically to the condition of seventeenth-century Rome, to that inextricable fusion

of imposition and accommodation, that highly successful and resilient traffic jam of

intentions, an anthology of closed compositions and ad hoc stuff in between which is

simultaneously a dialectic of ideal types, plus a dialectic of ideal types with empirical

context; and the consideration of seventeenth-century Rome (the complete city with the

assertive identity of its sub-divisions: Trastevere, Sant' Eustachio, Bargo, Campo Marzo,

Campitelli ... ) leads to the equivalent interpretation of its predecessor where forum and

thermae pieces lie around in a condition of inter-dependence, independence, and multiple

interpretability. And Imperial Rome is, of course, far the more dramatic statement. For, with

its more abrupt collisions, more acute disjunctions, its more expansive set pieces, its more

radically discriminated matrix and general lack of "sensitive" inhibition, Imperial Rome, far

more than the city of the High Baroque, illustrates something of the bricolage mentality at its

most lavish-an obelisk from here, a column from there, a range of statues from somewhere

else, even at the level of detail the mentality is fully exposed: and, in this connection, it is

amusing to recollect how the

influence of a whole school of

historians was, at one time,

strenuously dedicated to presenting

the ancient Romans as inherently

nineteenth-century engineers,

precursors of Gustave Eiffel, who had

somehow, and unfortunately, lost

their way.

Seventeenth-century Rome exemplifies the

dialectic of ideal urban types. It is a complete

city where the corporate parts assert their own

identity.

So Rome, whether Imperial or Papal, hard or soft, is here offered as some sort

of model which might be envisaged as alternative to the disastrous urbanism of social

engineering and total design. For, while it is recognised that what we have here are the

products of a specific topography and two particular, though not wholly separable cultures, it

is also supposed that we are in the presence of a style of argument which is not lacking in

universality. That is: while the physique and the politics of Rome provide perhaps the most

graphic example of collisive fields and interstitial debris, there are calmer versions.

Rome, for instance, is – if you wish to see it so – an imploded version of

London: and the Rome-London model may, of course, perfectly well be expanded to provide

a comparable interpretation of a Houston or a Los Angeles. But to introduce detail would be,

unduly, to protract the argument: and simply to terminate: rather than any Hegelian

"indestructible bond of the beautiful and the true," rather than ideas of a permanent and

future unity, we would prefer to consider the complementary possibilities of

consciousness and sublimated conflict: and, if there is here urgent need for both the fox

and the bricoleur, it is just possible that, in the face of prevailing scientism and

conspicuous laissez aller, their activities could provide the true and constant Survival

Through Design.

Collage City and the Reconquest of Time

The tradition of modern architecture, always professing a distaste for art, has

characteristically conceived of society and the city in highly conventional artistic terms –

unity, continuity, system: but there is an alternative and apparently far more "art"

prone method of procedure which, so far as one can see, has never felt any need for

such literal alignment with "basic" principles. This alternative and predominant tradition

of modernity – one thinks of such names as Picasso, [Igor] Stravinsky, [T.S.] Eliot,

Joyce – exists at a considerable remove from the ethos of modern architecture: and,

because it makes of obliquity and irony a virtue, it by no means conceives itself to be

equipped with a private pipe line to either the truths of science or to the patterns of

history.

"I have never made trials nor experiments." "I can hardly understand the

importance given the word research." ''Art is a lie which makes us realise the truth, at

least the truth it is given us to understand." "The artist must know the manner of

convincing others of the truthfulness of his lies."20 With such statements as these of

Picasso's one might be reminded of [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge's definition of a

successful work of art (it might also be the definition of a successful political

achievement) as that which encourages "a willing suspension of disbelief." The Coleridgean

mood may be more English, more optimistic, less drenched with Spanish irony: but the

drift of thought – the product of an apprehension of reality as far from tractable – is

much the same: and, of course, as soon as one begins to think of things in this way, all

but the most entrenched pragmatist gradually becomes very far removed from the

advertised state of mind and the happy certainties of what is sometimes described as

modern architecture's "mainstream." For one now enters a territory from which the

architect and the urbanist have, for the most part, excluded themselves. The vital mood

is now completely transformed. One is no less in the twentieth century; but the blinding

self-righteousness of unitary conviction is at last placed alongside a more tragic

cognition of the dazzling and the scarcely to be resolved multiformity of experience.

The two formulations of modernity which elaborate themselves may thus

be more or less characterised; and, allowing for two contrasted modes of "seriousness,"

one may now think of Picasso's Bicycle Seat (Bull's Head) of 1944:

You remember that bull's head I exhibited recently? Out of the handlebars and the bicycle seat I made a bull's head which everybody recognised as a bull's head. Thus a metamorphosis was completed; and now I would like to see another metamorphosis take place in the opposite direction. Suppose my bull's head is thrown on the scrap heap. Perhaps some day fellow will come along and say: "why there's something that would come in very handy for the handlebars of my bicycle ... "and so a double metamorphosis would have heen achieved.21

Remembrance of former function and value (bicycles and minotaurs); shifting context: an

attitude which encourages the composite; an exploitation and re-cycling of meaning (has

there ever been enough to go around?): desuetude of function with corresponding

agglomeration of reference: memory: anticipation: the connectedness of memory and wit:

this is a laundry list of reactions to Picasso's proposition: and, since it is a proposition

evidently addressed to "people," it is in terms such as these, in terms of pleasures

remembered and values desired, of a dialectic between past and future, of an impacting of

iconographic content, of a temporal as well as a spatial collision, that, resuming an earlier

argument, one might proceed to specify an ideal city of the mind.

With Picasso's image one asks: what is "false" and what is "true," what is

"antique" and what is "of today": and it is because of inability to make half-way adequate

reply to this pleasing difficulty that one is obliged, finally, to identifY the problem of

composite presence (already prefigured at the Villa Adriana) in terms of collage. Collage and

the architect's conscience, collage as technique and collage as state of mind: Levi-Strauss

tells us that "the -intermittent fashion for 'collages,' originating when craftsmanship was dying, could

not ... be anything but the transposition of'bricolage' into the realms of contemplation" 22: and, if the

twentieth-century architect has been the reverse of willing to think of himself as a bricoleur,

it is in this context that one must also place his frigidity in relation to a major twentieth-

century discovery. Collage has seemed to be lacking in sincerity, to represent a corruption of

moral principles, an adulteration. One thinks of Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning of 19II-

n, his first collage, and begins to understand why.

In analysing this production, Alfred Barr speaks of:

... the section of chair caning which is neither real nor painted but is acmally a piece of oilcloth facsimile pasted on to the canvas and then partly painted over. Here in one picmre Picasso juggles reality and abstraction in two media and at four different levels or ratios. (And) if we stop to think which is the most "real" we find ourselves moving from

aesthetic to metaphysical contemplation. For what seems most real is most false and what seems most remote from everyday reality is perhaps the most real since it is least an imitation.23

And the oilcloth facsimile of chair caning, an objet trouve snatched from the underworld of

"low" culture and catapulted into the superworld of "high" art, might illustrate the architect's

dilemma. For collage is simultaneously innocent and devious.

Indeed, among architects, only that great straddler Le Corbusier, sometimes

hedgehog, sometimes fox, has displayed any sympathy towards this kind of thing. His

buildings, though not his city plans, are loaded with the results of a process which might be

considered more or less equivalent to that of collage. Objects and episodes are obtrusively

imported and, while they retain the overtones of their source and origin, they gain also a

wholly new impact from their changed context. In, for instance, the Ozenfant studio one is

confronted with a mass of allusions and references which it would seem are all basically

brought together by collage means.

Disparate objects held together by various means, "physical optical

psychological",

the oilcloth with its sharp focused facsimile detail and its surface apparently so rough yet actually so smooth, ... partly absorbed into both the painted surface and the painted forms by letting both overlap it:24

with very slight modifications (for oilcloth facsimile substitute fake industrial glazing, for

painted surface substitute wall, etc.), Alfred Barr's observations could be directly carried over

into interpretation of the Ozenfant studio. And further illustrations of Le Corbusier as

collagiste cannot be hard to find: the too obvious De Beistegui penthouse: the roofscapes –

ships and mountains – of Poissy and Marseilles, random rubble at the Porte Molitor and the

Pavillon Suisse; an interior from Bordeaux-Pessac; and particularly, the Nestle exhibition

pavilion of 1928.

Le Corbusier as collagiste in his

solarium for the De Beistegui

penthouse.

But, of course beyond Le Corbusier the evidences of this state of mind are

sparse and have been scarcely well received. One thinks of [Berthold] Lubtetkin at Highpoint

2 with his Erectheion caryatids and pretended imitations of the housepainter imitating wood:

one thinks of Moreni at the Casa del Girasole with its simulated antique fragments in the

piano rustico; and one thinks of [Franco] Albini at the Palazzo Rosso. Also one may think of

Charles Moore. But the list is not extensive and its briefness makes admirable testimony. It is

a commentary upon exclusiveness. For collage, often a method of paying attention to the

leftovers of the world, of preserving their integrity and equipping them with dignity, of

compounding matter of factness and cerebrality, a convention and a breach of convention,

necessarily operates unexpectedly. A rough method, "a kind of discordia concors; a

combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently

unlike," Samuel Johnson's remarks upon the poetry of John Donne, which could also be

remarks upon Stravinsky, Eliot, Joyce, upon much of the programme of Synthetic Cubism,

are indicative of the absolute reliance of collage upon a juggling of norms and recollections,

upon a backward look which, for those who think of history and the future as exponential

progression towards ever more perfect simplicity, can only prompt the judgement that

collage, for all its psychological virtuosity (Anna Livia, all alluvial), is a wilfully interjected

impediment to the strict route of evolution.

And the argument is obviously that between two conceptions of time. On the

one hand time becomes the metronome of progress, its serial aspects are given cumulative

and dynamic presence; while, on the other, though sequence and chronology are recognised

for the facts which they are, time, deprived of some of its linear imperatives, is allowed to

re-arrange itself according to experimental schemata. In terms of the one argument the

commission of an anachronism is the ultimate of all possible sins. In terms of the other the

conception of date is of minor consequence. [Filippo] Marinetti's:

When lives have to be sactificed we ate not saddened if befote our minds shines the magnificent harvest of a superior life which will arise from their deaths .... We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind ... we are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal omnipresent speed. We sing of gteat crowds agitated by work; the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolution.25

and his later:

The victory of Vittorio Veneto and the coming to power of Fascism constitute the realisation of the minimum Futurist programme ...

Futurism is strictly artistic and ideological .... Prophets and forerunners of the great Italy of today, we Futurists are happy to salute in our not yet forry-year-old prime minister a marvellous Futurist temperament

might be a reductio ad absurdum of the one argument: and Picasso's

To me there is no past and no future in art .... The several manners which I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting .... AlI I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present.26

could be allowed to represent an extreme statement of the other. In theological terms, the

one argument is eschatological, the other incarnational; but, while they both of them may be

necessary, the cooler and more comprehensive nature of the second argument might still

excite attention. The second argument might include the first; but the reverse can never be

true, and, with so much said, one might now approach collage as a serious instrument.

Presented with Marinetti's chronolatry and Picasso's a-temporality: presented

with Popper's critique of historicism (which is also Futurism/futurism): presented with the

difficulties of both Utopia and tradition, with the problems of both violence and atrophy:

presented with alleged libertarian impulse and alleged need for the security of order;

presented with the sectarian tightness of the architect's ethical corset and with more rea-

sonable visions of catholicity; presented with contraction and expansion; we ask what other

resolution of social problems is possible outside the limitations of collage. Limitations which

should be obvious enough; but, still, admitted limitations which prescribe and ensure an

open territory.

It is suggested that a collage approach, an approach in which objects (and

attitudes) are conscripted or seduced from out of their context is – at the present day – the

only way of dealing with the ultimate problems of either or both Utopia and tradition; and

the provenance of the architectural objects introduced into the social collage need not be of

great consequence. It relates to taste and conviction. The objects can be aristocratic or they

can be "folkish," academic, or popular. Whether they originate in Pergamum or Dahomey, in

Detroit or Dubrovnik, whether their implications are of the twentieth or the fifteenth century,

need be no great matter. Societies and persons assemble themselves according to their own

interpretations of absolute reference and traditional value; and, up to a point, collage

accommodates both hybrid display and the requirements of selfdetermination.

But up to a point: for if the city of collage may be more hospitable than the

city of modern architecture, if it might be a means of accommodating emancipation and

allowing all parts of a pluralist situation their own legitimate expression, it cannot any more

than any other human institution be completely hospitable. For the ideally open city, like the

ideally open society is just as much a figment of the imagination as its opposite. The open

and the closed society, either envisaged as practical possibilities, are both of them the

caricatures of contrary ideals: and it is to the realm of caricature that one should choose to

relegate all extreme fantasies of either emancipation or control. Thus, the bulk of Popper's

arguments in favour of the emancipatory interest and the open society must surely be

conceded; but, while the need for the reconstruction of an operative critical theory after its

long negation by scientism, historicism, psychologism, should be evident, if we are

concerned with the production of an open city for an open society, we may still be concerned

with an imbalance in Popper's general position comparable to that in his critiques of tradition

and Utopia. This can seem to be a too exclusive focus on what, after all, are highly idealised

empirical procedures: and a corresponding unwillingness to attempt any construction of

positive ideal types.

It was the lavish perspectives of cultural time, the historical depths and

profundities of Europe (or wherever else culture was presumed to be located) as against the

exotic insignificance of "the rest," which most furnished previous ages of architecture: and it

has been the opposite condition which has distinguished that of our own – a willingness to

abolish almost all the taboos of physical distance, the barriers of space, and then, alongside

this, an equal determination to erect the most impervious of temporal frontiers. One thinks

of that chronological iron curtain which in the minds of the devout, quarantines modern

architecture from all the infections of free-wheeling temporal association: but, while one may

recognise its former justification (identity, incubation, the hot house), the reasons for

artificially maintaining such a temperature of enthusiasm can now only begin to seem very

remote. But when one recognises that restriction of free trade, whether in space or time,

cannot forever, be profitably sustained, that without free trade the diet becomes restricted

and provincialised, the survival of the imagination endangered, and that, ultimately, there

must ensue some kind of insurrection of the senses, this is only to identifY one aspect of the

situation-a likely aspect, an aspect as it might be conceived by Popper, and an aspect from

which the reasonably sensitive might well shrink. For is an acceptance of free trade to imply

absolute dependence upon it: and are the benefits of free trade to be followed by no more

than a rampage of the libido?

Up to a point the Popperian social philosophy is sympathetic. It is an affair of

attack and détente, of attack upon attitudes not making for détente. But such an intellectual

position which, simultaneously, envisages the existence of heavy industry and Wall Street

(as traditions to be criticised) and postulates the existence of an ideal theatre of argument (a

Rousseau version of the Swiss canton complete with organic Tagesatzung?) may also inspire

scepticism.

The [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau version of the Swiss canton (which had very little use for

Rousseau), the comparable New England town meeting (white paint and witch hunt?), the

eighteenth-century House of Commons (not exactly representative), the ideal academic

faculty meeting (what to say about that?): undoubtedly these-along with miscellaneous

soviets, kibbutzim, and other references to tribal society-belong to the few theatres of logical

and equal discourse so far projected or erected. But, if there should obviously be more of

them, then, while one speculates about their architecture, one is also compelled to ask

whether these are simply traditional constructs. Which is first to intrude the ideal dimension

of these various theatres; and which is then to ask whether specific traditions (awaiting

criticism) are in any way conceivable without that great body of anthropological tradition

involving magic, ritual, and the centrality of ideal type, and presuming the Utopian mandala

as incipient presence.

Since, though it may not be entirely apparent, we talk about a condition of

active equilibrium, the ideal Swiss canton of the mind and the New England community of

the picture postcard must now clamour for at least a brief attention. The ideal Swiss canton

of the mind, trafficked but isolated, and the New England village of the picture postcard,

closed but open to all the imports of mercantile venture, are reputed to have always

maintained a stubborn and calculated balance of identity and advantage. That is: to survive

they could only present two faces. Which, because it is a qualification that must be laid upon

the ideas of free trade and the open society, could, at this point, allow occasion to recall

Levi-Strauss's precarious "balance between structure and event, necessity and contingency,

the internal and the external ... "27

Now a collage technique, by intention if not by definition, insists upon the cen-

trality of just such a balancing act. A balancing act? But:

Wit, you know, is the unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other: and an effusion of wit, therefore, presupposes an accumulation of knowledge; a memory stored with notions, which the imagination may cull out to compose new assemblages. Whatever may be the native vigour of the mind, she can never form many combinations from few ideas, as many changes can never be rung upon a few bells. Accident may indeed sometimes produce a lucky parallel or a striking contrast; but these gifts of chance are not frequent, and he that has nothing of his own, and yet condemns himself to needless expenses, must live upon loans or theft.28

Samuel Johnson, again, provides a far better definition of something very like collage than

any we are capable of producing. His observations propose a commerce in which all

components retain an identity enriched by intercourse, in which their respective roles may

be continually transposed, in which the focus of illusion is in constant fluctuation with the

axis of reality; and surely some such state of mind should inform all approaches to both

Utopia and tradition.

We think again of Hadrian. We think of the "private" and diverse scene at

Tivoli. At the same time we think of the Mausoleum (Castel Sant' Angelo) and the Pantheon

in their metropolitan locations. And particularly we think of the Pantheon, of its oculus. Which

may lead one to contemplate the publicity of necessarily singular intention (keeper of

Empire) and the privacy of elaborate personal interests – a situation which is not at all like

that of ville radieuse versus Garches.

Habitually Utopia, whether Platonic or Marxian, has been conceived of as axis

mundi or as axis istoriae, but, if in this way it has operated like all totemic, traditionalist and

uncriticised aggregations of ideas, if its existence has been poetically necessary and

politically deplorable, then this is only to assert the idea that a collage technique by

accommodating a whole range of axis mundi (all of them vest pocket Utopias – Swiss canton,

New England village, Dome of the Rock, Place Vendôme, Campidoglio, etc.) might be a

means of permitting us the enjoyment of Utopian poetics without our being obliged to suffer

the embarrassment of Utopian politics. Which is to say that, because collage is a method

deriving its virtue from its irony, because it seems to be a technique for using things and

simultaneously disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy which can allow Utopia to be dealt

with as image, to be dealt with in fragments without our having to accept it in toto, which is

further to suggest that collage could even be a strategy which, by supporting the Utopian

illusion of changelessness and finality, might even fuel a reality of change, motion, action

and history.

Notes

1 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London and Chicago: 1966), 79. 2 Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: 1962). 3 Stanford Anderson, "Architecture and Tradition That Isn't Trad Dad," Architectural Association Journal vol. 80, no. 892 (1965) constitutes a significant exception. 4 Popper, Conjectures and RefUtations, op. cit., 131. 5 Ibid., 358-360. 6 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard Nixon, 1969, no. 265. Statement of the Establishment of the National Goals Research Staff. 7 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: 1957), 7. 8 Ibid., 10. 9 Ibid., 14. 10 William Jordy, "The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture of the T wemies and its Continuing Influence," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. XXII, no. 3 (1963). 11 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: 1959), originally published as Logik der Forschung (Vienna: 1934); The Poverty of Historicism (London: 1957). 12 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge: 1964). 13 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: 1969), 16. 14 Ibid., 16. 15 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: 1927), 18-19. 16 Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, op. cit., 17-18. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Ibid., 22. 20 Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: 1946), 271. 21 Ibid., 241. 22 Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, op. cit. 23 Barr, Picasso, op. cir., 79. 24 Ibid., 79. 25 ET. Marinetti, from the Futurist Manifesto 1909 and from appendix to A. Bellramelli, L'uomo Nuovo (Milan: 1923). Both quotations extracted from James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York: 1960). 26 Barr, Picasso, op. cit., 79-80. 27 Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, op. cit., 30. 28 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler no. 194 (25 January 1752).